“You showed me how, how to leave myself behind
How to turn down the noise in my mind
Now I haven’t got time for the pain
I haven’t got room for the pain
I haven’t the need for the pain
Not since I’ve known you” (Carly Simon, “Haven’t Got Time for the Pain”.  I’m not sure who Simon’s “you” was, but I tend to think of my wife and God—in that order!)

“What sounds in my life might prevent me from hearing God’s whisper?
What noise in my mind might also interfere?”

These questions were asked in my “3-Minute Retreat” this morning, put out by Loyola Press.  They strike me as being very important questions.

We live in a noisy world.  No doubt, you’ve noticed that.  We get used to the noise, but that doesn’t make the noise a good thing.

My wife and I recently had a nice getaway at a bed and breakfast.  The place was back a little-traveled country road and back a long lane.  It was so quiet that I had a difficult time sleeping.  You could almost hear the silence.

I grew up on a two-hundred acre farm.  The main nocturnal noises were crickets, whip-poor-wills, and my dad’s snoring.  Noise was not usually a problem.  However, even there, even when I was young, the mental noise was considerable.

While I can’t always live in the country, or otherwise turn down the volume on external noise, I can most certainly do something about the “noise in my mind.”  Here are some suggestions that I am making mainly to myself.  However, you, dear reader, may also find some of them helpful.  Let me know what works, or if you’ve found other things that work.

This mental noise is comprised of many things: my past experiences, my fears, my hopes, my insecurities, people who have been and are special to me, my desires, the opinions of other people, and so on.  If I listen to these, one by one, I think that I can make progress in sorting out what these various forms of noise are trying to say to me.

And that is the first thing: I need to listen to the noise in mind.  It may be that the noise is actually comprised of several voices to which I need to be listening.  Even when the noise seems incoherent, listening to it may be a good discipline.  While psychiatrists and psychologists may be especially good at listening to my mental noise, it may be that I can train myself to pay attention to it myself, at least in some measure.

Second, I have the right to turn down the noise level.  This is much easier after the noises/voices in my head feel as if they’ve been heard.  The voices in my head are often like small children, tugging on their momma’s sleeve.  If I ignore those voices, they just get louder and more insistent.  But if I smile and listen to them, and respond to them lovingly, then the voices (again, like a small child) are free to run along and play by themselves.

Third—and perhaps I should have listed this first—I need to recognize a very uncomfortable truth, which is this: I often want to choose mental noise.  Why?  I think mainly because it absolves me from the responsibility to do the next right thing.  And that is because the next right thing is rarely something I want to do.  If I can claim that the mental noise is so loud that I can’t think straight, then I don’t have to live straight.

Well, those are a few fairly random thoughts about the noise in my mind.  I hope that this post doesn’t simply add more noise to your already noisy mind, dear reader.

It may even be the case that, if I turn down my own mental noise, my external world may become a bit less noisy.  I may discover that, if I deal with my own mental noise, I can hear the crickets and whip-poor-wills again.  Dad’s dead.  I can’t hear his snoring these days.